Luckily, more often than not, those people have an established history of doing exactly that. And if enough other people in the thread are aware of it, they’ll see right through it.
Reminds me of an argument I got into with someone years ago who had a habit of doing this. At one point he asked me for a cite. I provided a cite that makes that shows gave credibility to my claim, it was a cite from a source he specifically mentioned that he considered reputable etc etc etc. I also provided it along with a disclaimer stating that I was sure he would have an issue with it for one reason or another and if he had an issue with it, he could email the people that posted it (a college university IIRC). Naturally, he had a problem with the cite for some new reason and I had no problem telling him to take a hike.
That’s perfectly reasonable. That’s what I did with the above poster and have done it plenty of times since. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with saying (out loud or otherwise) “I don’t really care if you believe me or not”. But you have to be careful. Do it too often and people will start to ignore everything you say. IMO, it needs to be reserved for people that are doing things like moving goalposts and otherwise not arguing in good faith.
Enough for what? Enough to say “this was on science channel”? Sure. But if your claim is “the Science Channel said this and I believe it is true” we need more to go on.
Absolutely. And moreover, if a variety of different posters who I respect ask me for a cite for something that’s bleedin’ obvious to me (say, that the sound of thunder travels slower than the visual of lightning), I’m not going to get huffy: I’m going to get fascinated. Did I say it wrong? Is there an enormous gap in the general understanding of basic physics? Am I vastly misunderstanding something about the subject? What the hell is going on?
Every.single.time. And if you are familiar with the youtube channel Half As Interesting, I keep hearing it in his voice since it sounds like something he’d do a video on.
The guidance in middle school was to not cite basic-ass info like what you’d find in the encyclopedia. It was probably not phrased that way. And this was before people were writing a dissertation for each episode of Buffy on Wikipedia. But I’d lump stock prices, many dot-gov data, event dates, etc.
If you’re interested in opinions/debate on why the U-6 unemployment rate is currently low, anyone both unfamiliar with the data and either unwilling or somehow unable to check is unlikely to have anything valuable to contribute to the conversation. So there’s no real need to include a link. That said, a courtesy cite might help someone learn something if you have the time.
Huh? That was exactly the stuff we were supposed to cite. Part of the reason being that we were learning how to cite things and that was a pretty easy resource to use (this would be in the 80’s/90’s for me).
As I recall, if you were writing a paper and looked something up, you’d cite it.
If someone shows interest in your opinion or wants to debate something and they’re unwilling or unable to find cites for things you said and you feel that makes them ‘unlikely to have anything valuable to contribute to the conversation’ and therefor there’s ‘no real need to include a link’, I feel like you should just decline to have a conversation with those people. That’s so incredibly condescending that I don’t even know what to make of it.
That’s the embodiment of making a claim and telling other people to ‘google it yourself’ when asked for a cite.
There’s no reason for anyone to take anything you say seriously with that attitude.
Well yes, if I start a thread “Why is U-6 so low?”, state my case, and then someone feels compelled to demand proof that U-6 is in fact low, I’m going to decline to have a conversation with them. That’s my point.
Obviously YMMV. We were told we were fuckups if we were getting material for papers from the encyclopedia. The following was closer to our guidance:
The “common” way to talk about common knowledge is to say that it is knowledge that most educated people know or can find out easily in an encyclopedia or dictionary. Thus, you might not know the date of the most recent meeting of the Federal Reserve, but you can find it out quite easily.
To be honest, if you started a thread with that assertion I’d suggest that right up front you should explain what you mean by “U-6 unemployment” (I’ve never heard of it and needed to look it up) and provide a cite that shows that low rate and places the figure in some sort of context.
Okay, that makes sense. I misread what you meant. In your example, you’re saying that you want to talk about why a set of data looks like it does not field questions about the veracity of the data itself.
I can understand that. But the problem is when there’s doubts about the actual data.
This thread started due to another thread in which Jim B made a statement of fact that didn’t make sense, he refused to provide a cite for it and claimed that we should simply trust his memory of a 20 year old news story. In his case, keep in mind, that even if he perfectly remembers the news story (the ‘data’), we still wanted to be able to see it for ourselves since it didn’t seem right.
In your case, if you wanted to discuss “why the u-6 is so low” and people are confused by your talking points because nothing about them makes sense, at some point, you’re going to have to provide the data you’re working with or people are going to lose interest.
If a teacher tells you you’re a fuckup for getting materials for papers from an encyclopedia…where did they want you to get it from? I can’t imagine a teacher ever saying that to us.
I had the same experience when writing reports when I was in grade school and high school in the 1970s and 1980s (well, except for the “fuckup” term) – my teachers were uniformly adamant that they would not accept encyclopedia articles as reference citations for those reports. We were expected to go to the library and find the information from non-encyclopedia books, newspapers, and magazine articles.
I suspect they didn’t phrase it that way. School in 7th grade had a big library and they were like “pick a topic you can find info on here.” I remember writing an absolute garbo paper about pirates in the revolutionary war. 8th grade did not (we moved) but they schlepped us to the UTEP library and turned us loose. I wrote something likely also garbo about the Lewis and Clark expedition.
But yeah, if I wrote “U-6 is low because the Dems control the WH and Senate,” some link to analysis (or my own) would be appropriate.
Actual books on the subject. I think maybe I could get away with encyclopedia cites in early middle school, when the focus is just learning the concept of a “research paper,” but by junior high, a paper that just cited Britannica a whole bunch would be an automatic fail.
And a Wikipedia cite, I’m pretty sure, led to direct summary execution.
